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Seting up:
1) Make a folder in which you will do all your work in.
2) Make a folder called DONE in which you will save your completed Gifs to
3) I made a separate folder for each character I do and a misc folder each with its own DONE folder for compiled Gifs

Capturing your screenshots: (Virtual Dub)
1) Open the episode you want
2) Press control+g or Edit--->Go to.
3) Use Jump frame at time: XX:XX:XX
First XX are minutes, second XX are seconds, XX are fractional seconds (dont worry about this one)
5) Go to the first frame of the scene you want to capture and press the MARK IN button.
(At the bottom of the screen the last set of buttons to the right, a black left and right arrow)
6) Go to the last frame of your scene and press the MARK OUT button kinds looks like _>
7)File -----> Save image sequence8) Choose the location of the folder you made before.
9) Set number of digits to 3, just to be safe (the number of digits wont affect anything but if you only choose 1 digit and your animation numbers in double digits you will get problems later on)
10) Name the files and push OK
11) Wait for it to save your screnshots (the little window in the middle of the window will disappear when its done.

ImageReady:
1) Open ImageReady
2) File -----> Import ------> Folder as frames3) Choose the folder you saved your screenshots to
4) It will load all the pics in order as frames
5) Image ------> Image size6) Change width to 100, most likely its on 640
7) If you save it as it is now the file will be the right dimensions and you will have an animated gif but it will most likely be too big, you might also want to do some more editing.
8) At the bottom of the screen there is a wide window that has all the frames in separate thumbs.
9) Delete frames to decrease file size
10) If you select a frame and select the new frame button under the thumbs it will make a new frame and in it will be the same pic as the one you had selected before (usefull for loops)
11) Also use the rectangular marquee to select the area you want to show if you want to show a certain part.
12) [b]Image ------> Crop.
13) Cropping and deleting frames (click image then trash can) really makes your gif smaller
14) If you did that and its still too big, make your width smaller, try not to go under 75 then it gets too small and hard to see.
15) Crop BEFORE sizing down to 100
16) When your done go to[b] File ------> Save Optimized Image As
17) Save it in your DONE folder.[/color]

Useful Tip

Custom Actions:

This is one of my favorite features about ImageReady. You can basically have the program "remember" what you do, sort of like teaching it how to do things. I use this to have it "remember" how I did my borders so I can just click the play button and it will do it automatically for me, its very useful and saves you a lot of time:

Locate the window that has "Layers" tab in it

1) Click on the "Actions" tab, to the right of the "History" tab.

2) Click the "Create new action" button. It looks just like the new layer button.

3) Name it, when you press enter you will see a red dot (recording)

4) Just about anything you do will be recorded, make a border and hit the stop button. (to the right of the red dot and the left of the "Create new action" button.

5) Thats all there is to it! Now when you click the play button, it will imitate exactly what you recorded, performing each step in sequential order. click the ">" and it will drop down all the actions it does. You can alter each action to adjust it.

I made an action for "1 Pixel Black Border" "2 Pixel Black Border" "1 Pixel Foreground color" and so on. This REALLY saves you alot of time. I also made one for the Auto levels/contrast feature. I selected layers and did it like 50 times, doing the process to layer 1, clicking the layer above it and doing the same process again, untill I hit a large number of layers. Now instead of doing Auto levels/contrast to every layer I just click play on this bad boy and usually the whole animation gets done in a second, a miracle action

Uzu you should really try Ulead Gif Animator. That way you can add it to a tutorial since not everybody has Image Ready. As time goes on you can add other programs that are good to use and maybe others can write up tutorials to add to yours to make everyone happy. Just a suggestion though so you dont have to really listen to me.

Exactly what i want, when people help others by answering questions I add it to the tutorial with their name attached to it of course, but I have to be confirmed that the information is true. Almighty if you made a tutorial for Ulead I could add it to this one and ask the mods to make this a sticky

Hey, your tutorial is awesome, though as you said some of the stuff is a little out of order and can be confusing (especially how you suggest cropping before resizing, but way after you explain how to resize :P that one threw me for a loop at first)! In any case, it rocks and I'm trying out the creation process as we speak. I've made a few so far--my current avatar, and these two, from Full Metal Alchemist and Last Exile:

Not terribly great, but I'm still pleased to be able to make anything at all. If anyone happens to want either of those two (fat chance!) go ahead. :P my question for you Uzumaki--how did you manage to get so many frames into this one and still keep it under 50K?!

I can't seem to fit in even a third of that many frames without going well over 100K filesize... any pointers?

Captain K: Try comparing the colour quality of Uzumaki626's "Gai Sensei" with your same "Gai Sensei", you will notice that Uzumaki626's GIF has less colour quality which will make the filesize automatically smaller. There is a chance that I might be wrong and that Uzumaki626 did something else though.

alrite let me reprhaise me looking for the virtual dub....i found that site but they gave me a zip file( which i dunno how to work) and i was looking for an installation file of virtual dub, it can be in that zip file but i dunno what to do w/ it. in that site it said to run virtualdub.exe which was not even in the zip file or maybe i'm just dumb....but anyways i really wanna learn how to make animated gifs and capture screen caps because they have really high quality, well compare to the compressed files you find in the net ^_^ thanx....

Captain K: Try comparing the colour quality of Uzumaki626's "Gai Sensei" with your same "Gai Sensei", you will notice that Uzumaki626's GIF has less colour quality which will make the filesize automatically smaller. There is a chance that I might be wrong and that Uzumaki626 did something else though.

That makes sense... I'm not terribly familiar with Image Ready, so I don't know exactly how to reduce the color quality in the frames I've pulled from a video file--is it a complicated process?

If you read the extended tutorial which is linked at the bottom, it tells you alot of extras on how to add border, text, change color size, manage custon actions and sutff. I dont think you saw it cuz your asking that question thats explained in the extended version

but anyways yea I dropped some colors and that made it smaller, adding a border also makes the file size smaller

and concerning virtualdub. use WinRar or Winzip or something to decompress it. Its not very big so I dont think it even has a installation file. The version I got, when I decompressed it, it was the actual files. Also becuse it doesnt necessarily put any system files, it doesnt need an installation. But get those programs that can handle .zips and you should be able to get it going.

Lately I've been using VDub Mod to create image sequences and now I came to the question: Which is the best file format(*.tga, *.bmp, *.png) to save an image sequence to do animated avatars/banners? I've been using *.png by the way.